The Payne Fund studies were conducted by a team led by Herbert Blumer to examine their effects of movies and children. The project which ran between 1929-1932 included more than 18 social scientists who produced eleven published reports.

Each study focused on three main areas: what was watched, who watched, and what was the effect on children. The researchers found there were influenced in a number of ways ranging from learning and attitude change to emotion stimulation and behavior influence. For example in Blumer’s fascinating study, Movies and Conduct (1933), more than fifteen hundred college and high school students wrote autobiographies of their movie-going experiences. He uncovered that movies teach kids things about life—attitudes, hairstyles, how to kiss, even how to pickpocket.

This research laid the foundations for many subsequentstudies involving the effects of movies, television and video games on children.

Lowery and De Fleur "pointed to their lack of control groups, problems in sampling, shortcomings in measurement, and other difficulties that placed technical limitations on their conclusions" (1995, 382).